Fri Jan 27, 2012 5:51PM GMT
Interview with Ralph Schoenman,

In a US Republican debate candidates Romney and Gingrich vent disinformation to demean the people of Palestine as they vie for Israeli lobby favoritism.

Press TV has interviewed Ralph Schoenman, Author of the Hidden History of Zionism from Berkeley about the entities that financially support Romney and Gingrich in their presidential campaign and how these financier’s imperialist interests are being played out in the Republican debates. What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: Interesting comments coming out of debate in Florida. What do you make of it? It seems that Romney and Gingrich were basically trying to top each other almost as if they are running for prime minister of Israel instead of president of the US.

Schoenman: Actually, all of these candidates are basically front-men for the structure of power in the US, intimately linked to finance and corporate capital and to the military itself. The principal advisers of both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have close ties to the military industrial complex.

In fact, their national security advisers service corporations that have something like 7.3 billion dollars in contracts and benefit directly from the militarization of the Middle East, from military aid to Israel and from the general imperial onslaught on peoples of the region.

Specifically, the Adelson family that is financing Newt Gingrich, made its money out of corruption namely the bribing of people in Macao for the building of casinos. They are billionaires and have given over ten million dollars to Gingrich in the recent campaign – having previously funded Binyamin Netanyahu and his election campaigns in Israel.

These are people who are linked to the same corporate and financial apparatus that sustains Barak Obama and his administration in power.

A key advisor, for example, of Mitt Romney is Cofer Black and another is Rabbi Dov Michael Zakheim who ran Pentagon operations, notably computer ground control of aircraft, for the Bush Administration. Cofer Black is the person long associated with the CIA program of torture and assassination and is one of the principal figures in Blackwater-XIE, the mercenary apparatus that has sustained operations for Central Intelligence as a private contractor.

Indeed there are as many troops in Afghanistan that are mercenary troops run by the likes of Blackwater, directed by such as Cofer Black, as there are formal troops of the US government itself.

Press TV: If you were to talk to the average American trying to figure out what’s going on and later on in November whom to vote for are you saying that it really does not make a difference because they are all coming from the same basic apparatus with the same perspective?

Schoenman: Yes. That’s long been understood in the US. The two parties are what we call the one big property party with two names. It’s financed by the same apparatus and they’re all intimately linked to the Pentagon and to the corporations that benefit from military contracts and from imperial control over resources of the peoples of the world.

As I say, the key advisors of both Gingrich and Romney have the most intimate ties with the military industrial complex and with corporations that receive billions of dollars of benefit.

Now, in the case of Romney, in this particular debate he declaimed that Hamas is led by people who want to exterminate all Jews and who launched “thousands” of rockets upon Israel, both statements that are patently absurd and false.

He announced in this debate that he would immediately move the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognize Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.

These political flacks for corporate capital are falling over each other in competing to sustain the legitimacy of the Zionist state and its most aggressive posture and to demean and, in racist terms, to denigrate the Palestinian people.